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Survey researchers in both the public and private sectors are required by strong legal and ethical considerations to protect the privacy of individuals and establishments who provide them with identifiable information. When researchers publish or share this information, they employ statistical techniques to ensure that the risk of disclosing confidential information is negligible. These techniques are often referred to as “disclosure limitation” or “disclosure avoidance” techniques, and they have been developed and implemented by various organizations for more than 40 years.

The choice of disclosure limitation methods depends on the nature of the data product planned for release. There are specific disclosure limitation methods for data released as micro-data files, frequency (count) tables, or magnitude (point estimates) tables. Online query systems may require additional disclosure limitation ...